I spent a week in Tokyo back in November. When I was there, I saw 2 iPhones in the wild. Both were owned by the Americans I was traveling with. That is also 2 more than the number of Blackberries I noticed (besides the one I have).
Everyone there has these flip phones with these really tall screens that rotate 90 degrees to "landscape" mode (they also watch TV on them).
So yeah, US style "smartphones" are not really used. They use these mutant flip phones instead.
I witnessed first hand the buying of an ISO 9001 certification.
I used to work for a company that manufactured industrial equipment for power plants, oil refineries, chemical plants, ships, etc. The company had a "quality system" in place and had ISO 9001 certification. We used to get audited periodically and every couple years had to get re-certified (it was a big pain in the ass).
Fast forward a few years and the company was purchased by a HUGE German corporation. When the time came for the yearly ISO audit, we were told to scrap our quality manuals and mark our departmental manuals as "reference only". I think something similar happened to the manuals at the next level up. We were then placed under the corporate umbrella and received a new ISO 9001 certification as part of this larger group.
Since then, I have switched companies within the same industry, and I work in the sales department. I can count the number of times on one hand that we are asked to provide proof of our ISO 9001 certification each year, and it is usually the same companies that ask each year.
I do not believe that ISO 9000 = quality products/services.
It sounds like a high-level player finally decided to take on Exchange.
According to this article, apple corporate has switched from a third party calendaring program to iCal so those feature additions make perfect sense.
from page 3:
Even home users that have no need for group calendaring will benefit from the new server-side improvements to iCal. That's because Apple didn't just build its iCal Server to fill out a feature check list. It has also begun using it company wide as its own corporate scheduling software in place of Meeting Maker. That means Apple employees are also now using the iCal client, and the result is that iCal itself has progressed rapidly.
I like to blow stuff up and you can probably tell by my list.
Halo 1 and Halo 2 are really really fun to play 2 players. The co-op for both is great, plus there is the fun of the multiplayer (2-4 players).
Gears of War is rising up my all time favorite games list too. Online and offline co-op as well as a incredibly fun multiplayer makes this a must have.
Burnout 2, Burnout 3, Burnout Revenge: Any of these is great great great fun for couch multiplayer. Fun arcade style racing, crashing minigames. This is a great game to play when people come over.
what games do they have that are going to be online enabled? Gamecube was online enabled as well. It was 1 game.
So far nintendo has just a few successful games online.
The games they do have have very basic online matchmaking and no "friends" list.
They have not announced what their online service will consist of, probably because they have no idea yet. If they had some grandiose plan, do you think they would be keeping it secret?
So lets sum this service up:
* Their existing online service for DS is very barebones
* They have not announced any _revolutionary_ things except for automatically sending you advertisements for games while you sleep.
* It will use everyones favorite "friend codes" and you have a different number for each game to keep track of.
All I can say is it better be free. And this vague plan sold you how?
Xbox Live has this service beat from the get go. Most of the features of live are free with silver:
* Integrating your profile on the xbox.com site to check friends list, messages, invites, etc. (also other websites like bungie.net and the PGR3 site where you can upload in gmae photos of your cars)
* Voice/text chat
* persitent friends list across all games
* demo/trailer/arcade downloads
* unified interface in EVERY game
and if you want to, you can pay the $3-4/month to upgrade to gold:
* matchmaking and online play
* player reviews
* sending messages to your IM client or cell phone
Oh and lets not forget how Live will be integrated into windows vista (i'm a mac guy sadly so I wont experience that).
If you dont like the 360 and/or its games fine, but dont for a second think that Nintendo's free service will hold a candle to what M$ has done with live. If online gaming excites you, you should probably stay away from wii.
yes I have. I guess adding a cool military theme and a cool commander mode and way more vehicle support is not improving it. let me guess, you think they should have stayed with the WW2 theme right?
did you guys say "oh great now we can have shitty mods" when the iD guys gave access to the WAD files?
How about when Valve let people have access to the half-life engine? Isn't counterstrike still the most played online game? I'm willing to bet that a serious portion of the half life cds have been sold just to play counterstrick.
What happened to the guys who made the Desert Combat mod for BF1942? Oh yeah, they got hired by the company and improved the game.
Look at the success of Xbox Live Arcade. You have a plethora of PC game developers making games and selling them on the Xbox system. These are all guys who could never make console games in the past.
MS made a bunch of tools to help developers make their PC games work on 360 and vice versa.
So now MS wants to let even more people in, and you guys bitch about it? Why because you have to pay $99? or because some kid will make a donkey kong clone with steve jobs and bill gates? or because you have to have a 360?
I'm willing to bet that some kick ass games come out as a result of this. Maybe some kid gets hired by a company and makes a truly kick ass game like Geometry Wars. Maybe some game comes out and gets noticed and picked up for Arcade. Who knows.
If you dont want to do it, keep the $99 in your pocket. But only good stuff can come out of this.
Practically every racing game out there gives you shitty cars to start with. In Forza Motorsport for Xbox I had to put 30 hours into it before I could get some of the cars. Unfortunately, that 30 hours took months and months of playing. So that was months until I could enjoy the content. Lucky for me I enjoyed the game and had the free time to do it.
For other games its not the case. I completely skip whole games because I know that I will not have the time to enjoy it. I generally shy away from RPGs for this reason.
The games that really get me mad are games with great multiplayer. Supermonkey ball is a perfect example. There are dozens of mini multiplayer games on there that I would like to play. Unfortunately you have to collect thousands of bananas to unlock them.
Some games my boys got for birthdays are like this. One of the Nickelodeon games we have has a multiplayer feature in it. Unfortunately you cannot play it until you beat the game in single player mode, which we never did. The thing that gets me about that game is that it lists multiplayer on the box as a feature. No mention of the fact that you have to play hours of borefest single player to get to it.
the load times on the 360 are longer than I would like them to be, but not bad enough to bitch about (actually the only one I bitch about is PGR3), but that is not the point. The point is that out of the box N made the wii unable to do HD. having a longer load time is not an option. having a HD game is not an option by design. That is BS in today's day and age. When the NES was released there were a lot of B&W tvs out still, but they did it in color anyway.
And the underpowered comment. Using nintendo's own words, the thing is not much more powerful than a gamecube. Comparing the leaked specs on IGN pegged it a little better than a Xbox 1 (albeit a stupid comparison probably). Again this is not an older system. This is a new system that is being released at least a year after the 360. The wii is a _new_ system, not an old one that companies are trying to sqeeze a few more bucks out of. They are hamstringing the 3rd party developers, the same 3rd party developers who they are trying to lure back, the same developers that abandoned the cube and left it for dead.
and as for the DVD player, why not. They have the drive there, they are using standard DVDs for games, why not let it play movies? thats cheesy on the level of the Xbox 1 making you buy a $30 remote.
umm have you forgot the mistakes they have already made?
1> let's not support HD. not every game needs to be HD. not everyone has a HDTV. it woudl sure be nice if the wii could support thm in the future though.
2> let's make it underpowered to make it harder for 3rd parties to port next gen games to revolution. I know ports of splinter cell games are not really the target of wii, but still making it hard to port them because of weak hardware is a sure fire way to make sure they are axed.
now we have what is possible the most stupid name for a consumer electronics device ever imagined. lets also make it kiddie sounding and sound like a potty word for the trifecta. gg nintendo. dumbasses.
why not just dust of the old snes or nes in your closet and play them now? you most likely already own all of your old favorites and I seriously doubt that N will be giving away their back catalog.
I agree with the "too small" thing. I just got my 360 last week and I already have a good amount of stuff on it. The quake 4 demo is over a gig. The PGR3 demo and a bunch of others are > 600 megs. HD trailers are hundreds of megs. Plus the 4 or 5 Live Arcade games I have too (not sure of the size on those though.
I'm not pushing my HDD, but its by no means empty. And storage on the order of single digit gigabytes would not be enough IMO.
Of course all of this may just be a ploy to sell memory stcks.
Why Microsoft was supporting a competitor at all is up for discussion.
Someone else said anti trust, but I think its another reason.
How about the fact that there are still millions and millions of macs out in the wild (with a large % being "connected" type people). If they didnt support macs to even the smallest degree they would be forcing their customers (the people with windows machines) who wanted to encode video that could play on macs and PCs to use another format, usually having to pay a fee to a competitor for Quicktime Pro/Real/Divx or whatever?
Doing a crappy job of porting WMP to macs sounds like good business to me.
obTinfoilHat: This has happend because pressures from mainstream political parties (you know who you are) drove Google to make blog content effectively invisible to your average searcher after truth, given how influential (and unregulated, forsooth!) political blogs have become.
I thought it was because bloggers google bomb the search results by spreading links out with a million trackbacks, creating a link farm and hiding it behind the guise of a weblog. For a long time it seemed to me that every time I searched for stuff, half the results were someone's stupid blog, not what I wanted to see. If I want to search people's online diaries, i'll do it.
go ahead and sit in your crappy office chair in the basement illuminated with a flourescent light bar and muck up your keyboard with your cheeto cheese covered fingertips and play WOW then with your face 9" away from your 17" monitor then. I'm gonna sit on my couch and play some kickass games on my big ass tv with my kids and friends.
I also read it at lunch time yesterday (actually during and after lunch time but don't tell my boss).
I hope like hell this guy doesnt get his ass sued off. If what he says is true, he didn't do anything wrong. I like reading his blog so it would be a shame for him to be sued into oblivion.
And I also hope that something good comes out of it for him and all the projects these maui xtream guy ripped off. If that video streaming crap is true and they are selling it for $10,000 a pop, maybe there is some money to be had for some very worthy OSS projects.
IGN has a lot of info on Forza. I would find you some good articles, but websense blocks the sites while I am at work:-( They really just have info on Forza, not head to head stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll bet all kinds of people are learning Java, just to make mods for Minecraft.
heh-heh. that was cool
It's nice when a bloatware provider removes their own crap!
So if they revise the hardware, the only way for an honest gamer to play games would be to become a pirate. LOL
I spent a week in Tokyo back in November. When I was there, I saw 2 iPhones in the wild. Both were owned by the Americans I was traveling with. That is also 2 more than the number of Blackberries I noticed (besides the one I have).
Everyone there has these flip phones with these really tall screens that rotate 90 degrees to "landscape" mode (they also watch TV on them).
So yeah, US style "smartphones" are not really used. They use these mutant flip phones instead.
I witnessed first hand the buying of an ISO 9001 certification.
I used to work for a company that manufactured industrial equipment for power plants, oil refineries, chemical plants, ships, etc. The company had a "quality system" in place and had ISO 9001 certification. We used to get audited periodically and every couple years had to get re-certified (it was a big pain in the ass).
Fast forward a few years and the company was purchased by a HUGE German corporation. When the time came for the yearly ISO audit, we were told to scrap our quality manuals and mark our departmental manuals as "reference only". I think something similar happened to the manuals at the next level up. We were then placed under the corporate umbrella and received a new ISO 9001 certification as part of this larger group.
Since then, I have switched companies within the same industry, and I work in the sales department. I can count the number of times on one hand that we are asked to provide proof of our ISO 9001 certification each year, and it is usually the same companies that ask each year.
I do not believe that ISO 9000 = quality products/services.
According to this article, apple corporate has switched from a third party calendaring program to iCal so those feature additions make perfect sense.
from page 3:I like to blow stuff up and you can probably tell by my list. Halo 1 and Halo 2 are really really fun to play 2 players. The co-op for both is great, plus there is the fun of the multiplayer (2-4 players). Gears of War is rising up my all time favorite games list too. Online and offline co-op as well as a incredibly fun multiplayer makes this a must have. Burnout 2, Burnout 3, Burnout Revenge: Any of these is great great great fun for couch multiplayer. Fun arcade style racing, crashing minigames. This is a great game to play when people come over.
what games do they have that are going to be online enabled? Gamecube was online enabled as well. It was 1 game.
So far nintendo has just a few successful games online.
The games they do have have very basic online matchmaking and no "friends" list.
They have not announced what their online service will consist of, probably because they have no idea yet. If they had some grandiose plan, do you think they would be keeping it secret?
So lets sum this service up:
* Their existing online service for DS is very barebones
* They have not announced any _revolutionary_ things except for automatically sending you advertisements for games while you sleep.
* It will use everyones favorite "friend codes" and you have a different number for each game to keep track of.
All I can say is it better be free. And this vague plan sold you how?
Xbox Live has this service beat from the get go. Most of the features of live are free with silver:
* Integrating your profile on the xbox.com site to check friends list, messages, invites, etc. (also other websites like bungie.net and the PGR3 site where you can upload in gmae photos of your cars)
* Voice/text chat
* persitent friends list across all games
* demo/trailer/arcade downloads
* unified interface in EVERY game
and if you want to, you can pay the $3-4/month to upgrade to gold:
* matchmaking and online play
* player reviews
* sending messages to your IM client or cell phone
Oh and lets not forget how Live will be integrated into windows vista (i'm a mac guy sadly so I wont experience that).
If you dont like the 360 and/or its games fine, but dont for a second think that Nintendo's free service will hold a candle to what M$ has done with live. If online gaming excites you, you should probably stay away from wii.
yes I have. I guess adding a cool military theme and a cool commander mode and way more vehicle support is not improving it. let me guess, you think they should have stayed with the WW2 theme right?
why all the hate?
did you guys say "oh great now we can have shitty mods" when the iD guys gave access to the WAD files?
How about when Valve let people have access to the half-life engine? Isn't counterstrike still the most played online game? I'm willing to bet that a serious portion of the half life cds have been sold just to play counterstrick.
What happened to the guys who made the Desert Combat mod for BF1942? Oh yeah, they got hired by the company and improved the game.
Look at the success of Xbox Live Arcade. You have a plethora of PC game developers making games and selling them on the Xbox system. These are all guys who could never make console games in the past.
MS made a bunch of tools to help developers make their PC games work on 360 and vice versa.
So now MS wants to let even more people in, and you guys bitch about it? Why because you have to pay $99? or because some kid will make a donkey kong clone with steve jobs and bill gates? or because you have to have a 360?
I'm willing to bet that some kick ass games come out as a result of this. Maybe some kid gets hired by a company and makes a truly kick ass game like Geometry Wars. Maybe some game comes out and gets noticed and picked up for Arcade. Who knows.
If you dont want to do it, keep the $99 in your pocket. But only good stuff can come out of this.
I agree with you 100%.
Practically every racing game out there gives you shitty cars to start with. In Forza Motorsport for Xbox I had to put 30 hours into it before I could get some of the cars. Unfortunately, that 30 hours took months and months of playing. So that was months until I could enjoy the content. Lucky for me I enjoyed the game and had the free time to do it.
For other games its not the case. I completely skip whole games because I know that I will not have the time to enjoy it. I generally shy away from RPGs for this reason.
The games that really get me mad are games with great multiplayer. Supermonkey ball is a perfect example. There are dozens of mini multiplayer games on there that I would like to play. Unfortunately you have to collect thousands of bananas to unlock them.
Some games my boys got for birthdays are like this. One of the Nickelodeon games we have has a multiplayer feature in it. Unfortunately you cannot play it until you beat the game in single player mode, which we never did. The thing that gets me about that game is that it lists multiplayer on the box as a feature. No mention of the fact that you have to play hours of borefest single player to get to it.
the load times on the 360 are longer than I would like them to be, but not bad enough to bitch about (actually the only one I bitch about is PGR3), but that is not the point. The point is that out of the box N made the wii unable to do HD. having a longer load time is not an option. having a HD game is not an option by design. That is BS in today's day and age. When the NES was released there were a lot of B&W tvs out still, but they did it in color anyway.
And the underpowered comment. Using nintendo's own words, the thing is not much more powerful than a gamecube. Comparing the leaked specs on IGN pegged it a little better than a Xbox 1 (albeit a stupid comparison probably). Again this is not an older system. This is a new system that is being released at least a year after the 360. The wii is a _new_ system, not an old one that companies are trying to sqeeze a few more bucks out of. They are hamstringing the 3rd party developers, the same 3rd party developers who they are trying to lure back, the same developers that abandoned the cube and left it for dead.
and as for the DVD player, why not. They have the drive there, they are using standard DVDs for games, why not let it play movies? thats cheesy on the level of the Xbox 1 making you buy a $30 remote.
no i'm not slow. why do you ask? are you looking for your father who obvisously passed the retard gene along to you?
umm have you forgot the mistakes they have already made? 1> let's not support HD. not every game needs to be HD. not everyone has a HDTV. it woudl sure be nice if the wii could support thm in the future though. 2> let's make it underpowered to make it harder for 3rd parties to port next gen games to revolution. I know ports of splinter cell games are not really the target of wii, but still making it hard to port them because of weak hardware is a sure fire way to make sure they are axed. now we have what is possible the most stupid name for a consumer electronics device ever imagined. lets also make it kiddie sounding and sound like a potty word for the trifecta. gg nintendo. dumbasses.
why not just dust of the old snes or nes in your closet and play them now? you most likely already own all of your old favorites and I seriously doubt that N will be giving away their back catalog.
I agree with the "too small" thing. I just got my 360 last week and I already have a good amount of stuff on it. The quake 4 demo is over a gig. The PGR3 demo and a bunch of others are > 600 megs. HD trailers are hundreds of megs. Plus the 4 or 5 Live Arcade games I have too (not sure of the size on those though.
I'm not pushing my HDD, but its by no means empty. And storage on the order of single digit gigabytes would not be enough IMO.
Of course all of this may just be a ploy to sell memory stcks.
Why Microsoft was supporting a competitor at all is up for discussion.
Someone else said anti trust, but I think its another reason.
How about the fact that there are still millions and millions of macs out in the wild (with a large % being "connected" type people). If they didnt support macs to even the smallest degree they would be forcing their customers (the people with windows machines) who wanted to encode video that could play on macs and PCs to use another format, usually having to pay a fee to a competitor for Quicktime Pro/Real/Divx or whatever?
Doing a crappy job of porting WMP to macs sounds like good business to me.
I thought it was because bloggers google bomb the search results by spreading links out with a million trackbacks, creating a link farm and hiding it behind the guise of a weblog. For a long time it seemed to me that every time I searched for stuff, half the results were someone's stupid blog, not what I wanted to see. If I want to search people's online diaries, i'll do it.
and... congratulations, you're 10 days late (which makes you a dumbass too).
go ahead and sit in your crappy office chair in the basement illuminated with a flourescent light bar and muck up your keyboard with your cheeto cheese covered fingertips and play WOW then with your face 9" away from your 17" monitor then. I'm gonna sit on my couch and play some kickass games on my big ass tv with my kids and friends.
pc gaming != console gaming
I also read it at lunch time yesterday (actually during and after lunch time but don't tell my boss).
I hope like hell this guy doesnt get his ass sued off. If what he says is true, he didn't do anything wrong. I like reading his blog so it would be a shame for him to be sued into oblivion.
And I also hope that something good comes out of it for him and all the projects these maui xtream guy ripped off. If that video streaming crap is true and they are selling it for $10,000 a pop, maybe there is some money to be had for some very worthy OSS projects.
yeah, speaking of all the _real_ searches, where is miss "wardrobe malfunction"? I thought that would have at least made a monthly "top search"...
Why haven't they embraced torrents?
they can't charge for torrents, or make you buy a super-ultra-platinum-extra-bonus membership for only $6/month.
IGN has a lot of info on Forza. I would find you some good articles, but websense blocks the sites while I am at work :-( They really just have info on Forza, not head to head stuff.